The Undiscovered Country (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2))

Member Name: Nomad

Product:	Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2)
Date:	02/12/04 (1075 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: How about the fact it's the best Playstation2 game out there. Period. , Freedom, man.

Disadvantages: Some pop up at times., I prefered the music in Vice City. , Oh, and we are all going to expect way to much from new games in the future.

A long time ago (1984) in a land far away (Wales) a young boy sits hunched over his Commodore 64 absorbed in the flickering display. Ahh, memories. Those were the days when you really did need a healthy dose of imagination to get the most from your video games. One of my favourite games of that period, and certainly the one that took up most of my time, was a little gem going by the name of ‘Elite’

This space combat and trading game was remarkable at the time because despite very basic wireframe graphics it conveyed a tremendous sense of freedom. It really felt that you could play the game any way you wanted. Follow the missions or do your own thing, become a criminal or operate within the law. It also helped that your arena wasn’t a city or world but an entire galaxy or two.

In terms of visuals, games have progressed in leaps and bounds since those days but only a small minority have managed to replicate anything close to that sense of freedom, however there is one series that consistently manages to stand out from the crowd and it goes by the name of Grand Theft Auto.

Back in 1997 the first GTA arrived in a blaze of controversy. It looked little like the game we know and love today being a top down 2D title. You played the part of a for-hire criminal attempting to make a name for himself. Working for a number of crime bosses you earned a reputation (and a stack of money) by completing a variety of missions. But it was the over-the-top violence in the game that caused it to hit the headlines.

Played over three cities (Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas) you could help yourself to any form of transport you could find in the game and you had numerous ways to complete the missions. Get bored of them and there were always additional ways to make money. The outcry from the media did little to put off gamers and despite (or perhaps because of) the controversy it was an immediate hit.

A sequel and add-on mission pack followed but it wasn’t until Grand Theft Auto 3 hit the Playstation2 in 2001 that we saw significant changes. While the gameplay was kept much the same the series had gone fully 3D and we found ourselves let loose in a living, breathing Liberty City. Suddenly all the reckless killing and car-jacking familiar from the series took on a whole new slant when set in one of the most immersive environments ever seen in a video game.

The follow up, entitled Grand Theft Auto Vice City, appeared in 2002. Set in the 80’s not only did it feature a new city but it opened up the gameplay further by providing additional forms of transport such as planes and helicopters, a bigger variety of missions and more money making opportunities including the option to own several businesses and properties. Along with improved visuals and playability it proved to be a major hit.

Which brings us to the present day. After two long years of apparently futile searching, my quest for the final hidden package in Vice City is going to have to go on hold. This is because we are about to be exposed to quite possibly the biggest game the Playstation2 (and most other consoles for that matter) has ever played host to. The latest instalment of the Grand Theft Auto series, known as San Andreas, is now upon us which means it’s time to ensure there’s plenty of food and drink in the house, and wave goodbye to your social life.

The previous GTA games broke all the sales records and there is every indication that this instalment is going to do exactly the same. All this puts Rockstar in a very fortunate position. With such a huge series on their hands they could easily have rolled out a simple re-hash. A new city, new music, a few extra missions and no doubt it would have been snapped up just as quickly as Vice City. But Rockstar are nothing if not ambitious.

Many games players will be very familiar to the mechanics of the series but for those who haven’t yet experienced the joys of the GTA universe it may be worth taking a couple of minutes to read one or two more in-depth opinions on GTA3 (such as one entitled ‘Drivetime, Liberty City Style’ by yours truly) and Vice City to get up to speed. In this op I’ll try to focus on what’s changed in this instalment although I’ll warn you now - I get a funny feeling this is going to be a long one (so what’s new!).

So, where to begin? Well, lets start with the basics. ‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ is set in the 1990’s. You play the part of Carl Johnson, or CJ to his friends. Five years ago he left his home in Los Santos, a city ruled by gangs and drugs. Returning home for his mother’s funeral, he finds his family in danger and his friends fighting a losing battle against corrupt police and rival gangs. Deciding it’s time to take back control of the streets he teams up with his old gang, the orange grove families, and starts to fight back.

So a new decade, a new cast of characters and another huge soundtrack but you’ll be glad to know that the gameplay remains largely the same with the familiar blend of main missions, side quests and bonuses to collect. So what exactly has changed?

Well, you may have noticed that the game is called San Andreas yet CJ’s home is Los Santos. Well that’s the first big change, your playing environment. You see, San Andreas isn’t a single city, it’s a whole state. This state is made up of three cities, (Los Santos, Las Ventura and San Fierro) each of which is the size of Vice City. In total the entire state is about four to five times the size of Vice City.

Each of the three cities provide their own unique environments. Much of Los Santos, based on Los Angeles, is run down and the focus is on gang territories. Move onto San Fierro, inspired by San Fransisco, and you’ll find more commercial territory. There are more property owning opportunities as well as better financial rewards for your hard work. However it’s only once you reach Las Venturas, or a GTA’d version of Las Vegas, that you’ll have a chance to start making some serious money (or throw it all away on the roulette table). There are many huge casinos and more property owning opportunities.

It’s possible to drive between the cities but far from being deserted, featureless spaces filling in the gaps you will instead find that the rest of the state contains about a dozen small towns not to mention farms, woods, interstates, rivers, valleys, coastlines and Mount Chiliad, the single largest structure in the game standing over half a mile high. Excited yet?

As expected there are a plethora of vehicles to take control of. In addition to the usual motorbikes, cars, trucks and boats you get to ride push bikes, quad bikes, tractors, forklift trucks, trains and even combine harvesters. The choice of air travel has also been expanded to include jet planes and a fully flyable dodo (as opposed to the crop-winged version found in GTA3).

As you may have expected it’s not just your environment that’s changed. Your abilities (or CJ’s depending how you look at it) have been improved dramatically. You are now finally able to swim, climb over fences and hoist yourself up ledges which goes a long way to sorting out some of the things I found most frustrating in the last two games.

But perhaps the biggest change is the personalization of your character which is represented in a number of ways. You now have a raft of statistics available detailing how much respect, stamina, muscle, fat and even sex appeal you have acquired. These are easily accessible with a press of the L1 shoulder button. In addition you can access a number of additional stats pages through the pause screen which show your experience level in various skills including driving, shooting, and flying.

Although the idea of using your experience to improve your skills was toyed with in Vice City (your stamina increased the more you ran) Rockstar have really embraced the idea here. In essence the more you do something the better you get. For example, the more you drive the easier the handling will get and you’ll be less likely to spin out of control or flip over. If you have a preference for one particular weapon then the more you use it the more accurate you’ll get so you can lock onto targets further away and, depending on the weapon, perhaps use two at the same time.

For the first time in a GTA game you are going to need to eat to stay alive. This isn’t much of a problem because there are plenty of food establishments around but if you live on fast food then you’re going to put on weight, which obviously means that your not going to be able to run very far or at any speed. To counteract the effects you can work out in one of the gyms dotted around the cities. You’ll also need to either spend some time in the gym or go for a run if you want to increase your stamina.

Your respect level is dictated by a number of things. Initially completing the earlier missions will earn you respect but it is also related to the clothes you wear, your haircut, tattoos and even the car you drive. Fortunately there are plenty of clothes stores, barbers and tattoo shops around which you can visit once you have earned some cash.

The prize for building up your respect level is being able to recruit your own gang members to fight beside you. How much respect you have determines how many gang members you can recruit. This is particularly useful in the early stages on the game which are set in Los Santos and focus on the gang culture. You’ll notice that Los Santos is split into different colours representing the different gangs. You can take over other territories by starting gang wars. This is done by killing several rival gang members on their territory. At this point you will come under attack from the rival gang. If you survive three waves of the attack you take control of the area. Obviously this is much easier if you have a number of recruits fighting beside you.

The familiar taxi and emergency services side missions are all back but this time they are joined by some new ones. Pick up a certain type of van and you can now burgle any of the enterable houses (and there are a lot more interior locations this time). Obviously the occupants may be at home so the game introduces a simple stealth element into the mix meaning you have to creep round the property without making too much noise.

On top of this are usual street races, arena events and hidden packages to find as well as new features such as horse racing and other forms of gambling, pool playing and several arcade videogames to play.

Technically the game has been tweaked in many places. Apart from the sheer size of the game world the draw distances have been doubled in the city and quadrupled in the countryside, which basically means that you can see much further into the distance. Thanks to the game being streamed off the disc as you play the loading screens only make an appearance when you enter or exit an interior location, meaning that you can drive from one side of the state to the other without any loading screens whatsoever which is damn impressive in anyone’s books.

Even though each character and building is more detailed the cities are far more densely populated with traffic and pedestrians than any of the previous games. Pedestrians behave more realistically, stopping and chatting to each other, parking, going shopping and having arguments all of which just goes to create an even more lifelike world for you to get sucked into.

Still with me so far? I’m sure I haven’t covered everything but I hope I’ve mentioned enough for you to understand that this is a major upgrade to the series rather than just more of the same. But with all these additional features and improvements it’s hard not to wonder if Rockstar have bitten off more than they can chew?

Well, thanks to the usual raft of statistics accessible from the pause screen, I can tell you that I’ve spent 46 hours playing this game and I’ve completed almost 38%. Based on what I’ve seen so far, in my opinion this is not only the game of the year but without doubt the best game that has yet appeared on the Playstation2.

I’m not saying that the game is perfect. The frame rate is low when compared to dedicated racing games which can sometimes make things feel slightly sluggish, especially when there is a lot happening on screen. Pop up is still an issue although it’s certainly no worse than in Vice City and to be fair this isn’t really an issue once you are in the countryside.

Despite big improvements the targeting system still occasionally refuses to lock on to nearby enemies, instead targeting some random spot on the floor which can be highly frustrating. While you can aim manually it’s too clumsy and slow to do so when you’re surrounded by half a dozen characters all shooting away at you.

As far as first impressions go San Andreas suffers a little from the Vice City syndrome in that if you’ve played either of the two previous games then don’t expect to be blown away the instant you load it up for the first time. After all, most people interested in this will already be used to having a whole city to run amok in. That said there is an undeniable thrill to getting your first look at your new surroundings and imagining the impressive stunts you’ll be able to perform when you get your hands on a fast car or bike.

Initially the requirement to build up your experience skills may well throw GTA veterans a little. No matter how adept you were at driving and shooting in the previous games everything seems a little more temperamental this time out. The cars skid out of control much more easily and your targeting distance and effectiveness isn’t particularly great to begin with. But I do need to stress that things improve drastically as you get further into the game and start to build up your experience.

But all these problems pale into insignificance when you actually start to play the game. Not only is this the most open and realistic environment ever to appear in a game but also you never quite know what experience is around the corner. Playing through the missions is only one aspect and apparently only accounts for about fifty percent of the game. There is as much fun to be had just exploring your surroundings as completing the missions.

It’s the little details that make the whole thing gel together. You can be cruising through the streets in your car listening to one of the ten or so radio stations when a police car races up behind you, sirens blazing. Suddenly you’re ready to make a run for it when you realise you’re not the one being chased. The pursued car crashes, there is a shootout and an ambulance appears. You begin to realise all these things are happening and it’s nothing to do with you. Pedestrians interact more with each other, they drive to the store and go shopping. Planes fly overhead and trains run between towns. While this existed to some degree in Vice City, you get much more of a sense here that life is going on around you regardless of your actions.

The overwhelming desire on first loading the game is, of course, to get out and explore your surroundings but as with the previous games you are restricted to certain areas of the map to begin with (although there are ways to reach these other areas prematurely but if you do the game gives you a full compliment of wanted stars and the cops make sure you don’t last too long). You do have access to one full city, Los Santos, and a large section of countryside and it’s the first time you get into the country that the true scale of the game begins to sink in.

But as you are driving, or running around you’ll start to notice other details, suddenly there are birds in the sky and fish swimming in the water. There are sunspots dazzling you as you drive, the red sky at sunset, the rain, the fog, the moon in the night sky. The grass swaying in the breeze or the water roughing up as a storm moves in. And of course those tantalising glimpses of the other areas of the map that you are unable to currently access. It’s all completely and utterly absorbing.

To access your huge array of abilities and skills you’ll need to dedicate a little time to working through the missions. Among the standard assassination and timed drive-from-A-to-B type missions are a number that introduce you to new features of the game such as housebreaking and stealth killings. Once these missions have been completed then you are free to use your newfound skills in the gameworld.

This system works extremely well and quickly introduces you to a number of aspects without overwhelming you in one go. Although it has no doubt helped that I’ve played previous GTA games I can see this being very straightforward to a series newbie. While you have the usual health bar and wanted level there are a wealth of further stats to keep an eye on but it never feels like a chore to maintain them and it certainly doesn’t get in the way of you playing the game.

Then there are the missions and the sheer variety of tasks on hand. One moment you’re stealing a combine harvester, the next you are dancing on the beach (achieved by pressing the four control buttons in time to the screen display). One mission might have you piloting a remote controlled plane while the next has you launching rockets at a full sized helicopter or hijacking a lorry. You may find yourself having to scare someone into talking by speeding around town with them tied to the front of your car or perhaps you need to infiltrate a ship to plant a transmitter or maybe you’ll find yourself on a motorbike racing to board a plane as it’s about to take off. The list goes on.

But what’s perhaps most impressive is how all these different aspects fit together so cohesively. It all feels just right, never like some aspect of the game has been shoehorned into a GTA game. Whether it’s building your muscles in the gym, dancing, or taking over a new gang territory it all fits seamlessly and that is a huge achievement.

Take the new stealth element as an example. Rather than offer the player a bewildering array of controls and complex visibility meter Rockstar have kept things simple. Pressing R3 allows you to crouch and move around quietly. Staying in the shadows means you’re much more likely to go unnoticed and when you do spot a target lock on using R2 and press circle to perform the kill. That’s it. It’s this simplicity that makes playing the game a pleasure rather than an ordeal.

There is one more aspect of the game that I should mention. This game is an 18 certificate and with good reason. It is extremely violent encouraging bloodshed at every opportunity and there is a vast amount of bad language from the moment the game first loads. Personally I don’t subscribe to the violence in games results in violence in real-life theory but that’s another opinion altogether. Consider yourself warned.

The violence aspect aside, there will, of course, be those who just don’t get on with it. It is one of those games that’s going to need you to invest some serious hours if you want to get the most from it. It’s not something you can slap on if you find yourself with a spare ten minutes. But I would strongly encourage everyone to at least give it a try because otherwise you will be missing one hell of an experience.

I don’t dare think how many thousand words long this op is by now but I’m sure I’ve missed out reams of information about this game. I haven’t mentioned the A list voice cast (Samuel L Jackson and James Woods to name but two) or the driving and flying schools you can attend, or the arena events.

Although I’ve unlocked Las Venturas I haven’t yet had much of a chance to visit the huge casinos and gamble away all my money. Then there are the optional two-player sequences. Perhaps I could just visit a bar and enjoy a full game of pool.

And that is exactly what makes this game so appealing. It’s all very well creating well-crafted missions and tasks but when you find yourself riding a bike down the huge Mt Chiliad just for the hell of it then you know your playing something very special.

I always like to end with a summary, mainly for the benefit of those who just skip straight to the end of one of my ops, so here goes. San Andreas is a complete shock. Buggy code and badly thought out controls make this an awful gaming experience that totally lets the series down. OK, just kidding. In truth this is an even better game that I could have hoped for and a stunning accomplishment for Rockstar. The strong narrative drives the game forward but make no mistake, you are free to play as you like.

There are some genuine surprises in store and I have no intention of giving the game away here because much of the enjoyment comes from discovering these things for yourselves. And yes, I know I’ve described a lot already but believe me, there is far more to the game that I haven’t even touched on here.

You need the time to invest but this is an immensely rewarding experience. It’s the sort of game you’ll be playing six months later and still be discovering new things but it’s not just the size of the gameworld that makes the difference. The new and tweaked abilities make a huge difference to the gameplay and really opens up the possibilities making this, quite possibly, my single most enjoyable gaming experience ever.

There are games developers out there that should take one look at San Andreas and then hang their heads in shame because this is how games should be made. I may be limited to awarding five stars but believe me when I say that does not do it justice. This is simple an essential purchase. Go, get and enjoy.

But before I go perhaps I’ll leave you with just one final thought. Just what the hell are they going to do with GTA6 on the Playstation3?


Thanks for reading.
© Nomad 2004



Game information
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'Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas' by Rockstar North. Published by Rockstar on Playstation2
Elspa age rating - 18
1 or 2 player
Memory Card for PS2 – 400KB Min
Analog Control Compatible: Analogue Sticks Only
Vibration Function Compatible
Exclusive to Playstation2 for six months so expect X-Box and PC versions to be here by next summer


Websites worth a look
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Official San Andreas Website - http://www.rockstargames.com/sanandreas


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